The U.S. economy's big problem? People forgot what 'normal' looks like

Re:The U.S. economy's big problem? People forgot what 'norma... by rayiner on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @07:15AM (#40209708)

Thank you, I wasn’t aware of that change. I’m trying to make sense of what’s going on, and it’s hard to do since everyone seems to be in the can for one political faction or the other, and money printing is something both parties did so people aren’t talking about it.

According to that source the accounting change is responsible for $11.4 trillion of the change. That means M1 really only went up from $4 trillion to $8.6 trillion in two years from February 2020 to June 2022. So we printed more money in two years of pandemic than in the previous twelve years of quantitative easing. How’s that still not the obvious culprit?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The U.S. economy's big problem? People forgot what 'norma... by reducesuffering on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @03:47PM (#40215449)

It's probably some of the culprit. But we've had 20% CPI since 2020, so it doesn't wholly explain everything in a "double the money, double the inflation" way. And a higher money supply doesn't mean that quality of life is worse either, since I'm sure you wouldn't want to go back to the 1930 US economy with vastly less money supply. If we could 2x the money supply again and get 1.1x goods & services for it, we should. Ultimately, I'm still not saying that recent inflation / money supply was good, just that you can't simply conclude that "because money supply went up, it's worse for people now."

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:The U.S. economy's big problem? People forgot what 'norma... by rayiner on Tuesday April 30, 2024 @08:19PM (#40218078)

Nobody is saying that money supply itself is what’s bad. The problem is that increasing it too quickly caused inflation that’s pissing people off.

[ Parent | on HN ]